TEACHER QUALITY IMPROVES AS THEY GAIN EXPERIENCE

September 19, 2005

State education plans that measure aggregate student scores by school may overlook an important component of overall education quality: teacher quality variation within a school, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The authors used data from the Texas School Microdata Panel to measure teacher quality by thee annual growth in each student's scores on the mathematics section on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS). They find that:

First-year teachers have much lower performance on average than other teachers.